FORA.tv Speaker - Dietrich Stephan

Biography

Dr. Stephan is a human geneticist who works to understand the root causes of common human diseases so that early diagnostics and interventions can be implemented. Dr. Stephan most recently was the deputy director of discovery research at the Translational Genomics Research Institute and still holds a faculty appointment there. Dr. Stephan has identified genes that predispose to disorders such as autism, exercise-induced heart attacks and sudden infant death syndrome, and contributed to understanding a multitude of common "complex genetic" disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Stephan is chairman of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Neuroscience Microarray Consortium, and has previously held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, George Washington University and the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Stephan has published extensively in journals such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Genetics and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Stephan received his B.S. at Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, and trained as a fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH.